A large portion of my business is putting together websites, and a lot of those are created using the WordPress CMS (Content Management System). I tell my clients all the time that managing their blog and utilizing social media will help considerably with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. I know that it’s important and a pretty solid contributing factor to SEO, but as someone with limited time and a clientele list that is 95% composed of referrals, I have not spent a lot of time practicing what I preach. This year I’ve made an effort to change that and hopefully use my own site as a reference for success.

Additionally, social media is widely used in today’s online marketing efforts, and for good reason. Again, related to SEO, social media can play a huge role in boosting traffic to your site if utilized correctly. Would I recommend it for every client that I work with? Yes, but to varying degrees. Does it make sense for a doctors office to use twitter? Not necessarily. But maybe it would make sense to have a Facebook page or a LinkedIn account. The use and degree of social media participation certainly varies for every client, but it can never really hurt your efforts to be found online if you take part in at least some level of social media marketing.

This year I have also made an effort to stay a little more involved in updating my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts as well as developing and testing some new avenues of social networking. Some of the new efforts include writing for another blog, using Tumblr and trying out Vimeo. So far all of the above efforts have shown a significant increase of inbound traffic to my site. It should be noted that I haven’t picked up any new clients as a direct relation to these efforts, but that wasn’t really my goal in the first place. If that happens, bonus, but I am really trying to build a case for recommending these same efforts to my clients.

We are now 1/3 of the way through 2012 and I have a pretty good indication of the effect that this is having on traffic to my site.

Some Numbers from the first 1/3 of 2012:

• Visits – Up 114%
• Unique Visits – Up 97%
• Pages Visited – Up 115%
• Time on Site – Up 35%

So, in short, it does work. As they say, numbers don’t lie. I am also currently helping to organize a blogging campaign with one of my clients. This particular client sells product on their site, so watch for the case study showing blogging and it’s potential to boost e-commerce sales numbers. Coming soon!